At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument is needed.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

"the warm heart of the Republican party"

Had to use that quote for the post title because it's not the sort of idea I would ever see expressed anywhere.

They can't admit it. It goes against all their conditioning,
all their training. They simply cannot admit that, for going on 40 years now,
the warm heart of the Republican party—namely, the conservative movement and
the fundamentalist Protestant right, both of which rose to power in the
late-70's—has converted that party into an identity-based cult, and now
the reactor's gone super-critical and nobody can remember which buttons to push
and which dials to spin. At this point, their identity is their
ideology—an ideology of victimhood, and of the fantasy oppressors that people
outside the cult see merely as evidence of a changing world. They look at the
country's shifting demographics the way that the Heaven's Gate people looked at
the Hale-Bopp comet. It's going to take something seriously awful to shake them
to their senses and, frankly, I'm not sure I want to live through whatever that
has to be.

Thanks for writing me a post, Mr. Pierce. Might as well steal the rest of it. I feel like DD doing this.

It's because they've become moronized by the
weaponized ignorance that spews forth every day from their favorite radio hosts
and their favorite TV news stars, and their crazy drunk uncle who can't stay
off the Internet, and Alex Jones, and the prejudices and meanness that every
human heart is heir to and to which Frank Luntz has made a career of
appealing, and the awful journalistic malpractice that has allowed the
ignorance to run unchecked simply because it wins elections and the country
gets worse, and there's always somebody else to blame.